Stellar Invests in Security Token Platform Targeting Developing Markets

The investment arm of cryptocurrency project Stellar has made its first enterprise bid on a security token platform that provides emerging economies with access to traditional assets and cryptocurrencies.

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) announced Wednesday it has invested $715,000 worth of lumens (XLM) tokens in DSTOQ, a security token platform that provides traders with access to global markets from their smartphones.

The foundation's CEO and executive director, Denelle Dixon, said DSTOQ's goals clearly aligned with Stellar's aim to make financial services more accessible. "It deeply resonates with our mission, which is creating equitable access to the global financial system," she said in a Twitter video post.

This is the first investment SDF has made from its enterprise fund, which was created in September to support projects that contribute to the broader Stellar ecosystem. DSTOQ, which is domiciled in Liechtenstein, already leverages the Stellar protocol to create security tokens that users can buy and sell peer-to-peer.

In a statement, DSTOQ CEO and co-founder Craig Mc Gregor described the SDF investment as a "vote of confidence" for its vision to use blockchain technology to develop new financial products as well as to improve accessibility into global markets.

Built on the blockchain, DSTOQ says it can tokenize blue-chip stocks, like Apple or Google shares, and make them available to investors irrespective of where they are in the world. The company opted to use Stellar in October 2018, saying its consensus algorithm made the protocol secure against 51 percent attacks.

DSTOQ says that it plans to use the SDF investment to develop new technology and help fund the platform's expansion into the Vietnamese and South African markets.

UPDATE (Feb. 27, 15:10 UTC): A previous version of this article stated DSTOQ used the Stellar protocol to create and trade security tokens. This has since been corrected.